CIM Report Shows Many Marketers are Ill-equipped for the Social Web

The UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) recently teamed up with Ipsos ASI and Bloomberg to carry out new research to assess how businesses are adapting to our social media fuelled world.

The results appear largely consistent with previous studies, although do provide a valuable benchmark for comparison with other data sources. And while many of the findings were focussed on adoption and usage patterns across four big social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube), the most interesting statistics came from marketers’ self-assessment of the value their businesses derive from social media efforts:

Only 27% of marketers use social media as a “core part of a campaign”, yet 28% claim to still be “just experimenting.”

Across all of the major channels, more people claim their social media activities are ‘not at all effective’ than ‘extremely effective,’ with YouTube being seen as the channel where being effective is most problematic.